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If shops actually stop selling birth control moderate Americans might be galvanized into voting :) I think that would affect a lot of people.. they might be sh

by jopsen 4y ago

If shops actually stop selling birth control moderate Americans might be galvanized into voting :) I think that would affect a lot of people.. they might be shy to speak out, but if suddenly it's not available they might vote.

crooked-v 4y ago
I don't know if it would. There are a huge number of people whose political views are basically incoherent [1], and on top of that "moderates" are an actually mostly nonexistent byproduct of the many people who don't fit neatly into the current political order [2]. [1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5891765/millennials-incoherent-politics-libertarians https://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5891765/millennials-incoherent... [2]: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-word-moderate https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-wor...
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  The irony of using Vox as a source of bias judgement which itself is extremely left-biased: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
  - mutant 4y ago
    https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ Guess other researchers think differently. Vox isn't extremely left.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    According to the chart you linked, it only goes as far as "left" and "right" and doesn't capture extreme bias at all.
  - jquery 4y ago
    Wow, this is garbage, I wonder who made it… And surprise surprise, this was founded by an ex-GOP consultant. There’s no need to consume fascist propaganda as part of a balanced media diet. Most of the outlets on the far right don’t qualify as news, and CNN isn’t hard left no matter how much it makes Republicans shriek. This is like a food chart and on the left we see fruits and veggies and on the right we see various animals droppings.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      Calling the other party Fascists isn’t a very bright thing to do either. Try joining a conservative discussion board and you’ll notice that they call Democrats Fascists/Totalitarian!
      - jquery 4y ago
        I don’t use it lightly. I used to defend conservatives from such slurs as unfair. After Trump, Jan 6 and their support of the coup , and this Supreme Court’s outrageous antidemocratic decisions, no longer. It is now a full on fascist movement.
- egberts1 4y ago
  Wut? No unbiased citation? I expect better of HN.
mschuster91 4y ago
What is voting going to use in gerrymandered or "stronghold" areas, which most of the US effectively is? US democracy, at least from an European POV, is completely and fundamentally broken, to the point that it will need a civil war to reset it to at least somewhat sane levels: - The GOP as a party is so far gone off the rails, so many actual Conservatives have left that there is barely any intra-party resistance left to the Tea Party, Trump and QAnon ideologues. - A large enough part of the GOP voter base is similarly radicalized after decades of brainwashing. Seriously, the kind of stuff that Fox "News" airs daily is scary. They will keep preventing reasonable politicians to challenge people like MTG. - The Democrat Party, which is center-right in its actual political doings from an European POV, has other issues: gerontocratic people like Feinstein or Biden who have long ago lost touch with the 99%, corruption, incompetence, and most importantly the lack of backbone. There have been many chances to codify access to abortions, everyone knew how thin the ice was, and the Democrats let many chances pass to permanently close that risk - only because they were scared of losing one of their major selling points. - Wealth disparity. The US is just plain shocking - you have people like Musk and Bezos worth hundreds of billions of dollars, money they can't ever truly spend even if they have a dozen children... and at the same time people die because they have to stretch out their expensive insulin or can't afford an epi-pen. Or they freeze to death because even while employed they cannot afford a home. - Climate change, assuming that the US will be able / willing to do anything past November, will need an awful lot of investments to handle. The Republicans won't grant any money (either because of "financial stability" or because "electric cars are for woke softies"), and the young people see the clock ticking. Some of them will radicalize, up to and including terrorism - why else were there snipers on the Supreme Court? Add on top of that the aftermath of covid - which still isn't over! - and the costs of the Ukraine war... and there's a perfect storm scenario of enormously destructive potential.
- Bhilai 4y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted, this is exactly how I and many friends I talk to feel.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
runarberg 4y ago
This statement can be measured against historical data. Democracies have regressed in the past. Prominent examples are in Russia and India, but also in Poland (as courts were made political) and Hungary. I do wonder if those trends actually deliver more turnout or less. I suspect less actually, as non-results are actually pretty demotivating in altering behavior. I’m not a historian but hopefully someone here is, and is able to make an educated guess of what the actual trends are.
- kcplate 4y ago
  I think it’s hard to compare those countries to the US, culturally they are way way different than the US. Russia didn’t really regress, did it? It experimented with 8 years of democracy after a thousand years of authoritarianism and went back to its comfort zone. Poland and Hungary as part of that soviet bloc once is affected by those old soviet ghosts still driving some of the culture. The US doesn’t have that long authoritarian past and is still pretty rebellious India…well it’s an enigma anyway with such ancient traditions and culture, it’s going to be an outlier anyway.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Poland regressed in similar direction as US as the already very limited right to abortion there was severely restricted by government and Polish equivalent of Supreme Court that overtly subscribes to Christian "morality".
  - KMag 4y ago
    Liberal democracy appears to be a metastable equilibrium that requires active management to resist authoritarian perturbations. The Roman Republic didn't have universal suffrage, but lasted almost 500 years, before gradually and then suddenly descending into authoritarian rule.
    - dmarchand90 4y ago
      Chemical stability is a function of temperature and I suspect democracy is a well, to some of political analogue. My fear is with the recent increase in wealth inequality democracy in America may no longer be the stable phase
Tozen 4y ago
So, are you suggesting that only when something directly affects them or maybe a family member, do they start to care? Otherwise, little to no empathy or compassion for those "others".
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Sadly, that's true for an awful lot of people. Even then you'd be surprised how many go along meekly with having their rights removed or withheld.
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  That is unfortunately always the case. And almost always it’s too late when they come for you (i.e you’re directly affected by something) and you finally feel like doing something about it.
- srvmshr 4y ago
  Unfortunately it is true. (I posted this interesting piece once on HN & it did not get the traction, but strangely relevant today): https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857976/--The-Only-Moral-Abortion-is-My-Abortion-an-article-by-Joyce-Arthur https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857976/--The-Only-...
- belorn 4y ago
  This is one reason why laws need to apply to everyone equally, since only by doing so will everyone have a equal interest that it exist and get enforced. It is also one reason why government and religion need to be separated, since otherwise there will be a imbalance between those who belong to that religion and those that don't.
- xkbarkar 4y ago
  Yes
- lazide 4y ago
  It's called 'only so many shits to give', and most people are all out and solidly overdrawn.
kcplate 4y ago
Birth control is a wholly different issue than abortion and not nearly as galvanizing. There is of course some hard core Catholic groups opposed, but beyond that it’s generally a scratch issue among other evangelicals. Most folks moderate to conservative just don’t give a shit about it. They just aren’t big on tax dollars paying for it. So you won’t see state laws being created specifically to challenge its legality and big money funding the activism in the same way as abortion. Same for same sex marriage, there is just not enough moderate political people against it. Repealing it won’t have the legs. Pro life support spanned the political spectrum, I think you can even fairly argue that despite her rhetoric to the contrary, Speaker Pelosi’s deliberate inaction may have been due to her faith and passive action against something she wanted to publicly appear to be “for” for wholly political reasons.
- ineptech 4y ago
  > Only a quarter of evangelicals in the United States believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, according to a new poll showing that a majority of self-identified Christians in the U.S. identify as “pro-choice” and less than half of evangelicals identify as “pro-life.” And yet, here we are. https://www.christianpost.com/news/less-than-half-of-us-evangelicals-identify-as-pro-life-new-poll-suggests.html https://www.christianpost.com/news/less-than-half-of-us-evan...
  - kcplate 4y ago
    We are here because one party decided that abortion should be legal in any and all cases—well past fetal viability, with zero limits and restrictions and knew they would never have been able to achieve that legislatively. The same political party then proceeded to rely on a court case about a physician’s privacy to practice medicine as a substitute for women’s body rights instead of creating legislation that could have at least guaranteed access to abortion in the first trimester, which would have received enough bi-partisan support to make Roe v. Wade a non-issue and relied on the 10th amendment and states to expand abortion access beyond the minimum guarantee. But instead, they did nothing but talk, and here we are…
    - 4y ago

by jopsen 4y ago

crooked-v 4y ago

I don't know if it would. There are a huge number of people whose political views are basically incoherent [1], and on top of that "moderates" are an actually mostly nonexistent byproduct of the many people who don't fit neatly into the current political order [2]. [1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5891765/millennials-incoherent-politics-libertarians https://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5891765/millennials-incoherent... [2]: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-word-moderate https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-wor...

systemvoltage 4y ago
The irony of using Vox as a source of bias judgement which itself is extremely left-biased: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
- mutant 4y ago
  https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ Guess other researchers think differently. Vox isn't extremely left.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  According to the chart you linked, it only goes as far as "left" and "right" and doesn't capture extreme bias at all.
- jquery 4y ago
  Wow, this is garbage, I wonder who made it… And surprise surprise, this was founded by an ex-GOP consultant. There’s no need to consume fascist propaganda as part of a balanced media diet. Most of the outlets on the far right don’t qualify as news, and CNN isn’t hard left no matter how much it makes Republicans shriek. This is like a food chart and on the left we see fruits and veggies and on the right we see various animals droppings.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Calling the other party Fascists isn’t a very bright thing to do either. Try joining a conservative discussion board and you’ll notice that they call Democrats Fascists/Totalitarian!
    - jquery 4y ago
      I don’t use it lightly. I used to defend conservatives from such slurs as unfair. After Trump, Jan 6 and their support of the coup , and this Supreme Court’s outrageous antidemocratic decisions, no longer. It is now a full on fascist movement.
egberts1 4y ago
Wut? No unbiased citation? I expect better of HN.

mschuster91 4y ago

What is voting going to use in gerrymandered or "stronghold" areas, which most of the US effectively is? US democracy, at least from an European POV, is completely and fundamentally broken, to the point that it will need a civil war to reset it to at least somewhat sane levels: - The GOP as a party is so far gone off the rails, so many actual Conservatives have left that there is barely any intra-party resistance left to the Tea Party, Trump and QAnon ideologues. - A large enough part of the GOP voter base is similarly radicalized after decades of brainwashing. Seriously, the kind of stuff that Fox "News" airs daily is scary. They will keep preventing reasonable politicians to challenge people like MTG. - The Democrat Party, which is center-right in its actual political doings from an European POV, has other issues: gerontocratic people like Feinstein or Biden who have long ago lost touch with the 99%, corruption, incompetence, and most importantly the lack of backbone. There have been many chances to codify access to abortions, everyone knew how thin the ice was, and the Democrats let many chances pass to permanently close that risk - only because they were scared of losing one of their major selling points. - Wealth disparity. The US is just plain shocking - you have people like Musk and Bezos worth hundreds of billions of dollars, money they can't ever truly spend even if they have a dozen children... and at the same time people die because they have to stretch out their expensive insulin or can't afford an epi-pen. Or they freeze to death because even while employed they cannot afford a home. - Climate change, assuming that the US will be able / willing to do anything past November, will need an awful lot of investments to handle. The Republicans won't grant any money (either because of "financial stability" or because "electric cars are for woke softies"), and the young people see the clock ticking. Some of them will radicalize, up to and including terrorism - why else were there snipers on the Supreme Court? Add on top of that the aftermath of covid - which still isn't over! - and the costs of the Ukraine war... and there's a perfect storm scenario of enormously destructive potential.

Bhilai 4y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted, this is exactly how I and many friends I talk to feel.
- mschuster91 4y ago

runarberg 4y ago

This statement can be measured against historical data. Democracies have regressed in the past. Prominent examples are in Russia and India, but also in Poland (as courts were made political) and Hungary. I do wonder if those trends actually deliver more turnout or less. I suspect less actually, as non-results are actually pretty demotivating in altering behavior. I’m not a historian but hopefully someone here is, and is able to make an educated guess of what the actual trends are.

kcplate 4y ago
I think it’s hard to compare those countries to the US, culturally they are way way different than the US. Russia didn’t really regress, did it? It experimented with 8 years of democracy after a thousand years of authoritarianism and went back to its comfort zone. Poland and Hungary as part of that soviet bloc once is affected by those old soviet ghosts still driving some of the culture. The US doesn’t have that long authoritarian past and is still pretty rebellious India…well it’s an enigma anyway with such ancient traditions and culture, it’s going to be an outlier anyway.
- scotty79 4y ago
  Poland regressed in similar direction as US as the already very limited right to abortion there was severely restricted by government and Polish equivalent of Supreme Court that overtly subscribes to Christian "morality".
- KMag 4y ago
  Liberal democracy appears to be a metastable equilibrium that requires active management to resist authoritarian perturbations. The Roman Republic didn't have universal suffrage, but lasted almost 500 years, before gradually and then suddenly descending into authoritarian rule.
  - dmarchand90 4y ago
    Chemical stability is a function of temperature and I suspect democracy is a well, to some of political analogue. My fear is with the recent increase in wealth inequality democracy in America may no longer be the stable phase

Tozen 4y ago

So, are you suggesting that only when something directly affects them or maybe a family member, do they start to care? Otherwise, little to no empathy or compassion for those "others".

anigbrowl 4y ago
Sadly, that's true for an awful lot of people. Even then you'd be surprised how many go along meekly with having their rights removed or withheld.
crossroadsguy 4y ago
That is unfortunately always the case. And almost always it’s too late when they come for you (i.e you’re directly affected by something) and you finally feel like doing something about it.
srvmshr 4y ago
Unfortunately it is true. (I posted this interesting piece once on HN & it did not get the traction, but strangely relevant today): https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857976/--The-Only-Moral-Abortion-is-My-Abortion-an-article-by-Joyce-Arthur https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857976/--The-Only-...
belorn 4y ago
This is one reason why laws need to apply to everyone equally, since only by doing so will everyone have a equal interest that it exist and get enforced. It is also one reason why government and religion need to be separated, since otherwise there will be a imbalance between those who belong to that religion and those that don't.
xkbarkar 4y ago
Yes
lazide 4y ago
It's called 'only so many shits to give', and most people are all out and solidly overdrawn.

kcplate 4y ago

Birth control is a wholly different issue than abortion and not nearly as galvanizing. There is of course some hard core Catholic groups opposed, but beyond that it’s generally a scratch issue among other evangelicals. Most folks moderate to conservative just don’t give a shit about it. They just aren’t big on tax dollars paying for it. So you won’t see state laws being created specifically to challenge its legality and big money funding the activism in the same way as abortion. Same for same sex marriage, there is just not enough moderate political people against it. Repealing it won’t have the legs. Pro life support spanned the political spectrum, I think you can even fairly argue that despite her rhetoric to the contrary, Speaker Pelosi’s deliberate inaction may have been due to her faith and passive action against something she wanted to publicly appear to be “for” for wholly political reasons.

ineptech 4y ago
> Only a quarter of evangelicals in the United States believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, according to a new poll showing that a majority of self-identified Christians in the U.S. identify as “pro-choice” and less than half of evangelicals identify as “pro-life.” And yet, here we are. https://www.christianpost.com/news/less-than-half-of-us-evangelicals-identify-as-pro-life-new-poll-suggests.html https://www.christianpost.com/news/less-than-half-of-us-evan...
- kcplate 4y ago
  We are here because one party decided that abortion should be legal in any and all cases—well past fetal viability, with zero limits and restrictions and knew they would never have been able to achieve that legislatively. The same political party then proceeded to rely on a court case about a physician’s privacy to practice medicine as a substitute for women’s body rights instead of creating legislation that could have at least guaranteed access to abortion in the first trimester, which would have received enough bi-partisan support to make Roe v. Wade a non-issue and relied on the 10th amendment and states to expand abortion access beyond the minimum guarantee. But instead, they did nothing but talk, and here we are…
  - 4y ago